RESEARCH AS A PASIS POR TELCUI7G

An Inaugural Lecture By LPWRENCE F:TENTTOUSE

Fortuitously, this year is the nine hundredth anniversary

of the birth of a man commonly regarded as the forefather of
the tradition c 4 rational speculation in western universities:
Peter

Abolard. His world was, of course, very different from

ours, and it is

(he which I am not competent to recreate.

But it is part ni my thesis that all human knowledge has about

it an element of :Irror, End I may perhaps adopt Abelard as a
source for my leEming even though I am not true to his teaching.
He was of curse a great dialectician, and by virtue of
this a great teoher. Ws should say today that his research
field was dialectics and that it fed directly into his teaching.
'It is,' h, wrote, one thing to inquire into truth by
deliberation, bt quite mother to make ostentation the end of
all disputation for while the first is devoted study which
strives to edif, the se,:ond is but the mere impulse of pride
By the one we set out to learn
which seeks onI for self glory.
the wisdom whit we do not possess by the other we parade the
Cl)
To call for research-based
learning which e trust is ours,
teaching is I uggest, to ask us as

teachers to share with our

pupils or stude;ts the process of our learning the wig ddom which
we do not posse so that they con get into

critical perspective

the learning wh:oh we trust is ours.

Resonrch-based teaching is
which of-tars imtruction

more demanding than teaching

through a rhetoric of conlusions.

Abelard tells to that he slipped from one to the other under

the distraction of his love for Hoioise.

2
'In monnure nc

-bhin

poDmionnte rnntime mbsorbed me more

and mere I devoted ever less time to philosophy and to

the work of the school.

Indeed it became loathsome to

me to go to the school or to linger there; the labour,

moreover, was very burdensome, since my nights wore vigils
of love and my days of study.

My lecturing became .

utterly careless and lukewarm; I did nothing because of

inspiration, but everything merely as a matter of habit.
I had become nothing more than a reciter of my former
discoveries, and though I still wrote poems, they dealt
(2]
with love, not with the secrets of
My colleague, Professor Malcolm Bradbury, has hinted fictionally
My
that some modern dons may have like problems, though their
diaries in the Times Higher Education Supplement appoar to claim
that travel and administration outweigh even family and
television as contemporary distracters.
The idea that research is a necessary basis for good
teaching is not universally admitted - much less practised even in universities.

Joseph Bon-David, reviewing Centres of

Learning for the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education,

provides an excellent statement of a contrary position.
Addressing the difficulty of reconciling research and teaching,
ho regards the competing demands on time and effort as only a
superficial impediment.end reaches after a more fundamental
conflict.

He suggests that 'knowledge that can bo taught no

longer requires investigation, while Knowledge that still needs

to be investigated cannot yet bo taught,' and he claims that
'teaching requires a body of established cuthoritativo knowledge.'
Now, Abelard worked in the context of a 'body of establised
authoritative knowledge' far more secure than most of us could
recognise today

the Scriptures, the writings of the Fathers of

the Church, and the authority of the Church itself; and this was

(3)

3
not an authority ho qm3stionod.

Yot hi5 position wa alplost

the opposito of that taken by Ben-David.

Established

authoritative knowledge hardly required teaching' it was

embodied in the Church or Was a matter of mere instruction.
Teaching was required whore doubt or bewilderment caused by
obscurity or apparent contradiction in the adthorities required
clarification ny dialectic.

His aim was understanding as a

fortification, but not the ground, of faith, for he conceded

that the final mysteries were inscrutable.

Christian doctrine,

the knowledge of God and his ways attainable by human beings,

was for Abelard 'essentially rational and logical, and....it
[4)
Whenever
lay within the province of human thought.'
appeal to the authority of the Church and it8 tradition left
space for interpretation and hence for error - called 'heresy' -

there was space for research and hence for non-authoritative

teaching.

The teacher could not, of course, claim to be an

authority without offence to the power of the Church.

Only in the presence of doubt is teaching called for, one
might gather from Abelard.

Only that which has the warrant of

certainty can be taught, Ben-David answers. And he can relate

his view to the one

hove represented by Anelard.

In....relatively closed traditions of higher learning,

combinAhg research with teaching presented no difficulty
since the difference between elementary and advanced
knowledge was not one of stubstance

of mastery.

cr certainty, but one

Original research consisted of novel

interpretation or systematization of the tradition and

could bo done as pnrt of the organisatlInn of the material
for teaching.

For academic teachers IT. the humanities

the ideal of their being original investi;ators was not a

nineteenth century innovation.

The university

had boon a

seat of creative scholarship in philosophy throughout the

Middle Ages, and many universities continued to employ
original scholars throughout the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. [5)

This is to aetribu1 tho di-r-Ploulty in ..,nnolling research

and teaching to the nineteenth century development in research
in which the German universities were leaders and of which we
In this development the pioneer field was

are all heirs.

history with its attendant technical studies such as philology,

palacography, diplomatic and archaeology.

Behind history came

the natural sciences and later the social sciences.

Now the environment of research in this new tradition was
not the lecture hall where the speculative disputation might be
conducted, but the archive, the library, the laboratory or the
field sito.

Research became collaborative by virtue of the

network of journals and the talk in coffee-breaks but the actual

activity was conducted in private,

It had become industrialised.

The stool rolling mill is not open to inspection as the local

blacksmith is.

In place of the speculative disputation open to

the student as participant observer, inquiry was expressed in

the archive search or the series of laboratory experiments, mute
occupations whose moaning was not self-explanatory to the
observer.
Ben-David contributes an intorsting analysis of the
problems of keeping research and teaching in mutual and
fortifying interaction, and concludes that by the end of the
nineteenth century 'the implementation of the ideal posed
serious problems,'

To these the American graduate school was

one response, associating research-based teaching with the

training of professional researchers.

Ben-David's diagnosis of

the Post-War situation is not encouraging.

There have been no serious efforts at constructive
restructuring of the relationship between research and
teaching....

The resulting frustrations have reinforced

the long-standing trend towards the transfer of the seat

of advanced research from the universities to non-teaching
research institutions.

(6)

5
Thn

rcln.br.o for Applic)d Rc3Roc

r,unclod

b In

by this university in 1970, initially as a non-teaching research

institution within a university setting.

The fact that we have

developed a graduate teaching programme on the basis of the

resultant research activity, has prompted me to address the
problems explored in this lecture.
The knowlodg we teach in universities is won through
research; and I have come to believe that such knowledge
cannot be taught correctly 'except through some form of researchbased teaching.

The grounds for this belief:are epistemological.

Knowledge of the kind we have to offer is falsified when it is

presented as the results of research detached from an undorstnding
of the research process which is the warrant for these results.
Abelard has a let to teach us here, for he is correct in his
understanding that what is represented as authoritative, and
established independently of scholarly warrant, cannot be
Knowledge.

It is faith.

What is unquestionable is

unverifiable and unfalqi-riablo.

It may be true belief, but it
is not Rri,: , wiwOge in the sense in which we in univorsitic 6 deal
Our ktlowledcw is
with it or are equipped to deal with it
questionable, verifiable and differentially secure.

Unless

our students understand that, what they take from us is error:

the error that research yields established authoritative
knowledge.

That this error is widespread must be apparent to

anyone who has listened to thG questions asked of academics by

laymon,on television.

And if wo educate teachers who will

transmit this error to their pupils, the error will continuo to

be widespread.

We shall support by our teaching the idea that

faith in authority is an acceptable substitute for grasp of the

grounds of Knowledge, even perhaps a substitute for faith in God.
Once the Lord spoke to man

now scientists tell us that....

This epistemological falsification in teaching researchbased knowledge authoritatively is compounded by a simple error.

6
We in the course of our research have made and witnessed a
large number of audio and video-recordings of teaching, and
we find it virtually impossible to locate passages of
authoritative exposition by lecture which are not criticised
by observers, who are as well-qualified as the lecturer, on
the grounds that they contain errors of fact or indefensible
judgements.
And these shortcomings are perceptible to only
a small proportion of students.
This intrusion of error into
exposition and instruction is not surprising, nor is it a
serious criticism of teachers as scholars.

The archetypal

effort to compress and present knowledge in accessible form,

the encyclopaedia, encounters the same problem, for all the
resources at the disposal of its editors. (7)
No teacher of normal endowments can teach authoritatively
without lending his authority to errors of fact or of
judgement.
But my case goes deeper than that
Were the
teacher able to avoid this, he would, in teaching knowledge
as authoritative, be teaching an unacceptable proposition
about the nature of knowledgea that its warrant is to be
found in the appeal to the expertise of persons rather than in
the appeal to rational justification in the light of evidence
I believe that most teaching in schools and a good deal in
universities promotes that error.
The schooled reveal
themselves as uneducated when they look towards knowledge for
the reassurance of authoritative certainty rather than for
the adventure of speculative understanding.
How to teach a different lesson is an educational problem
of considerable technical difficulty.
Even though education
be voluntary - and it is largely not so - the act of will by
which a person devotes himself to a sustained and arduous
course is not easy to maintain.
The teacher is not concerned
simply with the justification of knowledge.

He needs to
motivate and to sot up social situations conducive to work.

Leadership is necessary, authority is inescapable.

The

problem is how to design a practicable pattern of teaching

which maintains authority, leadership and the responsibility
of the teacher, but does not carry the message that such
authority is the warrant of knowledge.
This problem is not unlike that of explaining to a
naive person with no experience of our world that a television
sot does not make pictures but transmits images of things
taking place outside itself.

The view of knowledge one can

get in a classroom or lecture theatre is most often comparable

to that offered by the television set

Plato's similie of the

cave holds oven if we do not locate reality in ideal forms.

Taught knowledge is a shadow or picture of Knowledge rather
than knowledge as it is apprehended by the researcher who
creates or discovers it.
This problem of the relationship of the authority of the
teacher to the representation of knowledge in teaching has been
a central theme of my own work and that of some of my colleagues
In the

in the Centre for Applied Research in Education.

,jargon of our field it is the problem of inquiry - or discoverybased teaching or of teaching through discussion.

To my mind

the essence of the problem is expressed by declaring the a i m of

teaching in its fullest ambition to bp: to develop an
understanding of the problem of the nature of knowledge through
an exploration of the provenance and warrant of the particular
knowledge we encounter in our field of study.

Any education

which does not achieve this leaves its recipients disadvantaged

as compared with those who have followed courses where it is
echieved

for we are talking about the insight which raises

mere competence and possession of information to intellectual

power of a kind which can emancipate.
.

On this occasion I do not want to get trapped in the details

of educational research.

Rather I shall confine myself to

8
three specific problems encountered by those attempting
research-basod teaching in the sense T have given it.

They
are: the need to cover ground in a subject; the psychological
harriers to this kind of teaching; and the interpretation of
the idea of research-based teaching into the practice of
primary and secondary schools.
The problem of coverage is generally formulated by
asserting thtt discovery and discussion are such slow procedures
for learning that the need for a quantity of information
precludes their use.

If we are to cover the curriculum we sot

ourselves, we must needs resort to instruction.

Of course we need instruction.

And text-books ton.

The: key is that the aim of discovery and discussion is to

promote understanding of the nature of the conco.ssinno, to
error that are being made in that part of our teaching where we
rely upon instruction or text-books.

The crucial difference

is between an educated and an uneducated use of instruction.

The educated use of instruction is sceptical, provisional,
speculative in temper.

The uneducated use mistakes

information for knowledge. Information is not knowledge

until the factor of error, limitation or crudity in it is
appropriately estimated, and it is assimilated to structures
(8) realms of meaning, (2) modes of
of thinking - disciplines,
experience (10) - which give us the moans of understanding.
Two parallel activities need to be pursued: instruction,
which rives us access to conclusions which represent in
simplified, and hence, distorted, form our best grasp of a
realm of knowledge and moaning and learning by inquiry or
discovery, which enables us to understand how to utilise such
a representation of knowledge, to assess its limitations and
to develop the moans of pushing outwards beyond these
limitations.

9
Tho interaction bgtween inquiry and instruction is
perhaps best understood through a

concrete instance.

person of my acquaintance is practising as a non-graduate

research worker in biochemistry in a government research
agency and at the same time taking an undergraduate degree in
the Open University.

At once,

therefore, a professional

researcher and' an undergraduate, this student is advantaged

as compared with those not engaged in research by the clearer
perception of the status and use
possible by research experience.

of toxt-book

knowledge made

The justification of research

as a basis for acarning or for teaching is the perspective to

be gained from the hill of inquiry over the plain of knowledge.
But more than this, the seeker, the questioner, the
researcher, is always at

an advantage: vie a vie the person who

claims to be a Knower; hence, the dramatic structure of Plato's

dialogues.

One can combine inquiry-learning and instruction

appropriately only by using the inquiry

to teach the student to

question the instruction.

Heroin lies the psychological barrier to research-;based
t; aching.

in authority, but
depreciate my claim to be en authority. (11)
It may leave me

it asks me

to

The article on

research in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica,

the memorial summery of the British perception cif knowledge on
the threshold of the First World War, observes that
'Investigations of every kind which have been based on
original sources of knowledge may be

styled 'research', and it

may be said that without 'research' no authoritative works

have been written.... (12)
The implication is that research,

by allowing us to produce authoritative work, makes us

authoritative.

Such authority is prestigious and highly

satisfying personallyJ but it is vulnerable to the next

questioner, and even more so to changes in the paradigm of

knowledge. [13)
Sir Welter Scott remarked of the persistence
of astrology:

10

Grove rend stualc uc mean worL.,

to relinquish the
calculations which had early become the principal objects
,

1,1th

of their studies, and felt reluctant to descend from

the predominating height to which a supposed insight....
had exalted them over the rest cf mankind. (14)
The psychological reluctance to abandon the claim to be
an authority is reinforced by fear of tre implications for the
social order, where such authority holds hierarchy in place, as
my colleage, Professor Robert Ashton perceives.

'Like the

schoolmaster, the university don, the householder, the civil

magistrate and the King himself, the master (of apprentices)
wields on authority which is in essence paterncAistic and
contributes to the maintenance of order in society zap whole.' (15)
Our deop psychological and social needs for that conception
of knowledge which makes the elders curators nf truth are yet
further reinforced by our need as teachers for institutional
authority in the schools and universities in which we work.
As Derek Morrell and John Withering ten wrote in their Schools
-

Council Working Paper on the Raising of the School Leaving Age,

- from which our Humanities Curriculum Project sought its
validation
IT the teacher emphasizes in the classroom, his common
humanity with the pupils, and his common uncertainty in
the face of many problems, the pupils will not take kindly
to being demoted to the status of children in other
relationships within the same institution. (1S)'
In authority-based teaching the teacher is Promethean:
in research-based teaching the teacher evokes a Promethcan
response from the student, who casts his master in the role of
Hephaestus.

In teaching there is always a retaining of power

as well as a conferring of power.

Research-based teaching,

11

conceived as inquiry-booc 4 tomt ,hing, shl-P-bs tho halanne of

power towards the student.
It is his own research or inqui-ing
-

which gives the teacher the strength to do this

Yet it

happens that, fathering en Oedipus, the teacher is tempted to

expose him to destroy him.
These are difficult matters, and most of us go for
compromises; but they are compromises charged nonetheless with
the emotions aroused by the extromos.

I claim no more than

that a research base offers the teacher a security for his

authority in

mastery of seeking rather than of knowing, and

hence provides him with a necessary protection in the enterprise

of educating these who will, he wants to hope, exceed his grasp.
The view of knowledge and teaching which T have outlined
seems at first sight to apply to universities, but not to schools.
This is not a limitation I accept,
Research may be broadly defined as systematic inquiry made
public.

The inquiry should, I think, be rooted in acutely felt

curiosity, end resew rch suffers when it is not.

Such inquiry

becomes systematic when it is structured over time by continuities

lodged in the intellectual biography of the researcher and
co-ordinated with the work of ethers through the cumulative
capacity of the organisation of the discipline or the subject.
Systematic inquiry of this sort - or approximation to it is to pattern of learning by a thoughtful study of prublems.
Such study becomes research when it is made public by being
published, at which point the student makes a claim intended to
evoke a critical response: that the reported inquiry has
resulted in a contribution to knowledge, being soundly based and
in some sense new.
,

Saving only this final stage of publication such inquiry is

possible as a basis -For learning at quite early stages of

12

education.

When it takes place the teacher is not an

instructor but instead takes the critical role assigned in fully

blown research to the scholars in the subject who react to
publication.

And there is no better experience than to work on

this pattern with a teacher who has the imagination to initiate

inquiry and the judgement to discipline it

The pupils make

trials or essays within the inquiry, and the teacher offers an

experienced critical reaction.
Thus, when a teacher of six-year olds separates two
children who are fighting and, using them as independent
witnesses, invites the class to question them and attempt to
reach a judgement concerning the causes of the conflict, that
teacher is already equipping these children to understand that
the averred causes of the First World War, which they may some
day consent to rehe arse for '0' level history, are not
unproblematic.

Only such teaching can tend to provide the

learner with an acceptable view of accepted knowledr ea that

is, as questionable knowledge which for present purposes does
not need to be questioned.
One of the teachers with whom our Centre is working is
Known to her pupils in a Dorset middle school as 'the hypothesis
teacher', a tribute to her capacity to stimulate hypothetical
thinking within the American social studios curriculum, MAN.

a Course of Study, which, under the inspikation of Jerome Bruner,

reached after a framework to support children in an inquiry
into the nature of humanness as it can he understood through

the study of animal behaviour, anthropology and comparative

sociology, sot in a context of values.

[17)

Bruner spoke of a

'courteous translation of knowledge into the grasp of children.

think that the courtesy lies in conceding the importance of
the right pf the learner to speculate, to learn autonomously to
criticise and correct intelligent errors which reach after
understanding.

(187

13

Inquiry-based teaching of this sort necessarily aims at

higher levels of attainment than are commonly settled for in
schools and it naturally needs the support of instruction.
Such instruction is best provided, not through the lecture
given by the teacher, but rather through books and audio-visual
materials, since this enables the teacher to maintain his
critical stance towards the instruction.

But the teacher

will feel secure in such a role only if he is research-minded

It
to the extent of having an inquiring habit cf thought.
will be his task to interpret his claim as a man of knowledge
to support his capacity to manage en inquiry towards understanding,
(19)
Ho must not diminish the
to validate the search'.
importance of that search by suggesting that it can be avoided
by appeal to him as an authority who con warrant knowledge.
The teacher's qualification is in that knowledge of
which the universities are curators, knowledge based upon
inquiry organised as research.

Such Knowledge celebrates the

capacity of the human mind to deal with problems or doubts in

at least some areas of human concern, not by a leap of faith,
Confronted by
but by a calculated and secure uncertainty.
the fact that if there is knowledge which is absolute it is, like
Abelard's Gad,

firi Ny inscrutable, we settle for serviceable

approximations which can be progressively sharpened by

Only by keeping
sceptical, but systematic, questioning,.
teaching in touch with inquiry can we do justice to this
element in the knowledge we represent.
The university stands - or should stand - behind inquiry
in schools as the curator of that uncertainty without which
the transmission of Knowledge becomes a virtuoso performance
We do net live up to our principles,
in gentling the masses.
of course, but it is of the first importance that we do not
Whenever
rest from trying to do so, routinely from day to day.
We

assort and bully with cur authority instead of reasoning on

an equal base with those we teach and helping them to liberate

14
themselves from cur authoribv as the source of truth, WO
invite them to faith rather thfln to knowledge.
And our

credentials to teach do not support our caiming faith from

our students.

The University holds no secrets of life and

experience except through what Oakeshott has called 'arrests

of experience',

(20)

the partial perspectives which alone g,ive

us a purchase on the limitless universe of experience and

hence the possibility of understanding, which we call
'Knowledge',
We are within reach of Abolard, whose 'statement that
our beliefs must be understood does not mean that in his vi ow
complete comprehnsion of divine matters was possible to men

C21)

But while Ahelard's element of uncertainty, constituting as it

did a limitation of understanding of the divine, was associated
with a sonse of deficit, for some of us at least the uncertainty
of research-based knowledge is a valued asset,

The alternative

presents itself, not as the mystical apprehension which supports

faith founded in God, but as the threat that certainty will be
ideologically based and that truth will be dictated by political
authority.

It is the thesis of Thrasymachus we oppose,

And since Thrasymachus spoke with the confidence of the

practical man, let me at this point, warned by experience,
combat what I believe to he a Misapprehension about the relation
of speculation to action.

(I em forewarned of this by

criticism of our Humanities Curriculum Project, which sought to

offer a speculative style of education through dialectic to
(9
The uncertainty
those who would leave school at sixteen), - 2)
or provisiona].ity of knowledge which I have associated with
research is not to be equated with uncertainty of commitment or
failure of the will to act.

It does not preclude faith or

commitment as that which we hold firmly in cur minds', but

rather builds upon it and elucidates it,

Commitment needs to

be interpreted be -Fore it can inform action, and the man of

15
action is more typically he whe Gnh act without the
reassurance that his interprotaticn is certoin than he who
can act only when unafflicted by doubt.
Security in
uncertathnty is the armour which a speculative education can
offer.

It is a valuable equipment for the practical man.

Not everyone will agree with my analysis of the nature

of Knowledge and its relation to research and to action.
There are those who agreeing, will judge knowledge dangerous
because it gives power to the dispossessed and those who,
wishing it were more dangerous, will believe tilet it lacks the
(23)
power to break the domination of the hegomony.
But the
achievement of secondary education for all signals, if it
does not realise, the aspiration towards a knowledge-based
education Pt every stage of schooling and for everyone - not
merely for scholars - and commits the teaching profession to a
struggle with the consequences of that ambition.
Historically the groat majority of the children of this
country have been offered in the state educational system,
whether through tho elementary school or the secondary modern
school, no more than a rudimentary education in the basic
skills and such an acquaintance with knowledge as migt be
expected to inculcate a respect for those who are knowedgeable.
Their lot has boon to accept that truths are defined by the
authority of others,

This tra d ition has loin alongsis a

tradition among the gentry of knowledge as a more accomplishment

or appurtenance of style.

The juxtaposition at tnose

traditions has not merely impaired our capability in the

(24) it has also dofined scholarship in tla
industrial arts,
liberal disciplines as merely technical, and the results of
this are to he observed in the discontent with higher
education of many intelligent students, who resist the idea
that technical prowess is the precondition of curiosity rather
than its servant.

16
In the fnmiliFIr tradition the uses of knowledge are
reserved for an elite, while the burdens of knowledge are
imposed on the generality by on imperious pedagogy.

Schools

provide students with competences without enhancing their

powers.

There are gross inequalities in the distribution of

the moans of thinking and hence of the power thinking confers

and consequently the creation of a proletariat of the intellect.
To provide an alternative tradition of access to
knowledge is a formidable problem for teachers, and it is not
problem to be solved by a change of heart.

Important as it

may be to declare worthwhile aims for education, good

intentions do not pave tho way to their fulfilment.

What is

needed is progress in the art of teaching as a public tradition

anC a pe rsonal achievement.
The character of the art of teaching is to represent to
learners through social interaction with them meanings about
knowledge.

The succession of experiences we provide for them,

and within the framework of these experiences the nuances of

our questions, our judgements of their work, our tutorial
advice, even the very gestures and postures of our bodies, are
expressive of those meanings, sometimes explicitly, sometimes

as elements in what has come to be called a 'hidden curriculum.' (25)

Teaching represents knowledge to people rather as theatre
presents_ life,
Some of those who have called teaching an art appear to
think that this suggests it is all flair and no learning.

As

if actors or dancers or musicians have nothing to learn.

Others, on the contrary, imply that it is all skill and can be
learned by the

imitation of models an the pattern of apprenticeship.

Under the regime of the elementary school, which

emphasized a training in skills for pupils, teaching itself

17

could be reduced at the level of minimum competency to a set of

skills for pupil teachers.

Under such assumptions the training

of teachers mirht be conducted through some sort of apprenticeship,

for the masters could do in masterly fashion what the apprentices
would he coned upon to do.

This is not true today.

It is not

only that the past masters would L'ind themselves inadequate in

present classrooms, though I believe this to be true.

It is

because the act oF teaching as a reorosentntion of knowledge is

inherently problematic.
Teaching which accepts fidelity to knowledge as a criterion
can never he judged adequate and rest pentent.

Teachers must

be educated to develop their art, not to master it, for the claim
tn mastery merely signals the abandoning et aspiration.
Teaching is not to be regarded as a static accorrplishment like
riding a bicycle or keeping a ledger

it is, like n13 a.cc of

high ambition, a strategy in the face of an impossible task.

It is the existence of such vocations with open frontiers
for development which provides

basis within the modern

university for the second traditional strand in the universities

which intertwines with thot of liberal education; the
professional schools, and among them schools of education.
Changes in society, changes in Knowledge, related changes in
professional role all contribute to professional doubt and
uncertainty, which is confirmed by the experience that old
And I have argued that the controlled

recipes no longer work.

and organized exploitation of such uncertainty in the disciplines

of knowledge - the reseorch tradition - is central to the modern
university treition.

Research as a strategy is applicable not

only to the humanistic and scientific but also to the

professional disciplines.
Most of you will have noticed the ambiguity in my title.
Just as research in history or literature or chemistry can

18

provide a basis for tenchiv.T, those ibt, 50 oducaticrml

research can provide a bases for teaching and learning e.bout
teaching, Professional 31 iii end understanding can be the
subject of doubt, that is, of knowledge, and honor of research.
In education what mint such researnh look Like,
In this country, sin :c the nineteen fifties, the received
doctrine ins been that t

core of education for teaching, lies

educa t r, but in thc application to

not in rfsearch

educatiol of the conclis o 3 of research in the 'contributory

Most
psvchel ogy and sociology.
disciplines' of philosoo
of thesi teaching thole t sciplines to tlachers have not been
able to share a rosea'c

ass with thoir students, who are clearly

quite Lllikelv to hoc m. 'hilosophers, psychologists, or

sociolgIsts, since t)e'r
All to

on professional courses for teachers.

easily philos :nhers psychologists and sociologists,

whose re

rob e s are problelatic in their own fields, become

only sometime again' . t thei wishes - authorities in courses for

teachers,
An alternative to the constitutuent disciplines approach
is to treat oducatIon itself - teaching, learning, running
schools and cducat.enal systems - as the subject of research,
This alternative s not characterized by a neglect of disciplines,
upon which it dra Js eclectically, but rather by the fact that
.

what is drawn frcm the disciplines and applied to education is

not results or efen the theories which give shape to each
discipline, but methods of inquiry and analysis together with
The
such concepts a have utility for a theory of education.
problems solo

for inquiry ore selected because of their

importance as 3ducotional probloms3 that is, for their

significance Jr) the context of professional practice.

Research

and developmei.t guided by such problems will contribute primarily

to the unders:anding of educational action through the

19
construction of theory of v Illoobir,r1 or 7 tradition of
understanding.
Only secondarily will research In this mode
-

contribute to philosophy, psychology or sociology.

And this

principle of applied research is, I think, appropriate mutatis

mutandis in all the professional schools cf our universities.
How can I host make clear the implications of such a
position?

Let me take as a point of departure an example of

research and training which I take to be sub-professional.

In Ohio State University I visited the Disaster Center, a
research and development unit concerned with making more
effective the response of the omergency services to disasters.
There I sow in a laboratory an exact re p lica of the Columbus,
Ohio, police nerve contr a .

Police staff were released to man

their -Familiar positions while simulations of disasters were

fed through their information channels and their responses were
studied.

While I was watching, a simulated airplane crash an

a Columbus suburn was enacted.

It was cleverly contrived.

News that the wife of one of the men on the switchboard had
just given birth to a son was fed through as a distracter.
Information that the deputy suourinten&nt's family had been
badly injured when the plane hit his residence invited the team
to override public priorities with private ones.
training were well integrated.

Research and

The task was to find the best

procedure, to test it against interference and then to enable

the emergency team to react smoothly and automatically without
needing to DPUSO for thought or run aground on difficult
judgements.

The laboratory situation was a godsend.

You

cannot keep crashing pianos on Columbus as a research strategy.

If we were to take this as a model for educational.
research, then we should provide laboratories which simulate
classrooms.

Desks carefully carved with graffiti might be

20

assembled, wells might he hung with the Fall of Icarus and

centre-spreads from the Teachers' World, fans could pump in the
scent of sweat and damp clothes mixed with chalk dust,

But

what of the pupils?

We deal in education - as in medicine or law or social
work - with human action which cannot he channelled through
headphones.

We need real pupils, and we cannot

them in doubtful experiments

properly engage

or even in placebo treatments.

In short, real classrooms have to he our laboratories, and

they are in the command of teachers, not of researcher8.

This

is the characteristic of professional schools; the research act

must conform to the obligations of the professional context.
This is what we moan by action research.

It is a pattern of

research in which experimental or research acts cannot be

exempted from the demand for justification by professional as
well as by research, criteria.

The teacher cannot learn by

inquiry without undertaking that

the pupils learn tor; the

physician cannot

oxooriment without attempting to heal,

As the

Tavistock Institute put it: "No therapy without research, no

research without therapy", (26)
Such a view of educational research declares that the theory
or insights created in collaboration by professional researchers
and professional teachers, is always provisional, always to he
taught in a spirit of inquiry, and always to be tested and
modified by professional pre.ctico.

The teacher who founds his

practice of teachinF upon research must adopt o research stance

to his own practice: it must he provisional and

explorctory.

It is this that marks him out as a professional, as

compared to the Ohio police emergency team; for while the
object of the disaster simulations is to allow them to respond

21

effectively without pausing for thought, the object of educational

research is to develop thoughtful reflection in order to

strengthen the professional judgement of teachers.
-

This implies that the educational researcher and the

teacher must have a shored language.

No doubt there is a need

for Increasing the research literacy of teachers, but there is

also a lot of room for research couched in the vernacular.

Here

the language of history is good mor'el: George I instituted

professorships of history in 172a for the purpose of traim_ng
public servants, and historians still speak of politics in
language politicians can understand. (27)
If we want to influence
action, we must have very strong excuses when we abandon the
vernacular of action.
It also imeliPs that the teacher be committed to inquiry in
the process n F his teaching on the grounds that nothing he is
-

offered by teachers of teachers should be accepted on faith,

Anyone who doubts this scenticism would do well to study the
case of Cyril Burt, (28)
In teaching about teaching as in teaching about the
disciplines of knowledge we can offer some tips and rules of
thumb, but these should not don the mantle of expertise,
Moreover, such lore is sub-professionals

Professionalism is

based upon understanding as a framework of action and understanding

is always provisional.
The infusion of teaching by tho spirit of inquiry is
difficult enough in the context of teaching the disciplines of
knowledFe,

It is even more difficult in professional schools

where the natural cry from the fields of professional action is

for the reassurance of certainty to omeliorate the agony of
responsibility.

It is still more difficult in initial training

22
situations, where scmc

nro

in more need of instruction in

clinging to an overturned dinghy than in navigation.

But

even here the short cut of accepting a 'rhetoric of conclusions'

is one wo must struggle to avoid.

As the McNair Report said

'The training of teachers must always be the subject of

(29)
experiment.
It is a crowing point of education ;
Growing points ere uncertainties because uncertainties are
potentials.

It is the task of universities to keep those

potentials open.
The ambition of the programme I have proposed might be
understood to remove it from reality.

Inaugural lectures in

education can too on,fortahly address the problems of the school

in the sky.

Not so in this case.

I am talking of my everyday

practice as on educational researcher and teacher of teachers.

But my practice is not successful.
only by lowering our sights.

Success can he achieved

The future is more powerfully

formed by our commitment to those cntorprises we think it worth

pursuing even though we fall short of our aspirations.

Abelard's

setting out 'to learn the wisdom which we do not possess' commits
him and we who follow him to the pursuit of on elusive, everreceding goal,

In such en enterprise research is by definition

reinvent for its gains accrue, not from a leap towards finality,
but from the gradual cumulation of knowledge through the patient
definition of error.

Its achievement is always provisional,

the base camp for the next advance,

We shall only teach hotter

if we learn intelligently from the experience of shortfall3 both

in our grasp of the knowledge we offer and of our knowledge of
how to offer it.

That is the case for research as the basis

for teaching.

20th February, 1979

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. J.G. Sikes, Peter Abailard (New York: Russell & Russell, 196+, 1st
edition 1932Tp.55'
2. Peter Abelard, The Story of My Misfortunes (Historia Calamittgril
translated H.A. Bellows (New York: Macrlillan, 1972, lst editiol :922)
pp. 18-39
3. Joseph Bon-David, Centers of Learning: Britain,France,Germany,Llited
States (New York: McGrow Hill for the Carnegie Commission on Hijor
Education, 1977) pp. 93-94
4. J.G. Sikes, p.50
5. Joseph Ben David, pp. 94-95
6. Joseph Ben David, p. 124
7. See Harvey Einbinder, The Myth of the Britannica ftendon: MacGibbon
and Kee, 1964)
8. See Paul H. Hirst,"Liberal education and the nature of knowledge"
pp, 113-138 in Philosophical Analysis and Education edited by Reginald
[g65)
D. Archamboult (London: Routledge & Kegan
.

9. Philip H. Phenix, Realms of Meaning (Now York: McGraw-Hill, 1964)

10.Michael Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1933)
11.The distinction is taken from R.S. Peters, Eth;thsr' and Education
See also the same author's
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1966)
Authority, Rosponsibilityand Education (London: Allen & Unwin 1959)
.

12.Encyclopaedia Britannica Eleventh edition, 1910

13.Sea Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago
University ef Chicago Prose, 2nd edition, 1970)
14. Sir Walter Scott, Guy Mannaring, Chapter IV
15.Robert Ashton, The English
1978) p. 9

Civil War (London; Weidonfeld & Nicholson

16.The Schools Council Working Paper Nn. 2 Raising the School. Leaving Age
(London: H.M.S.. 19653 p.22
17. MAN: a course of study was developed by the Educational Development
Center, Cambridge, Mass. and is published and disseminated by
The British
Curriculum Development Associates of Washington, D.C.
dissemination agency is the Centre for Applied Research in Education,
University of East Anglia.

18. Jerome S. Bruner, The Prqcess of Education (Cambridge. moss: Harvard

University Press, 19661 5T52
-

19. See Janet P. Hanley, Dean K. Whitla, Eunice M. Moo and Arlene S. Walter,
Curiosity, Competence, Community: Man: A course of Study: an Evaluation
(Summaryof original two volume edition) (Washington, D.C. Curriculum
Development Associates, 1970) p.5
20. Michael Oakeshott, op. cit.
21. J.G, Sikes p.36
22. The Humanities Project: an Introduction (London: Heinemann Educational
Books 1970) A bibliography of this project is available from:
The Secretary, Humanities Curriculum Project, Centre for Applied
Research in Education, University cf East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ
23. See Antonio Gremsci Selections from the Prison Notebooks od and
trans. by Q. Hoare and G.Newell Smith (London: Lawrence 2, Wishart, 1971)
24. As has been argued by Correll! Barnett in "Technology, education and
industrial and economic strength", the first of three Royal Society of
The Royal Society
Arts Cfttor Lectures on Education for CaFability.
of Arts Journal, 127, 5271, 117-130
25. See Philip W. Jackson, Life in Classrooms. Mow York: Holt. Rinehart
Winston, 19681 The concept is now widely adopted.
26. Quoted by Duncan Smith, "Action Research and the Ford Teaching Project:
a strategy for evaluating classroom practice". (Unpublished M.Ed.
dissertation, University of Liverpool, 1979)
27. Excellent treatments of the common language and common sense virtues
of history are: Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff, The Modern Researcher
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, revised edition, 1077)
, and J.H. Hextor The History Primer
(London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1972)
These ore nf course a
personal selection.
-

28. See Oliver Gillie, "Sir Gyril Burt and the great I.Q. fraud" New
Statesman, 24 November 1978 pp.688-694
29. Teachers and Youth Leaders (London: H.M.S.0. 1944) (Board of
Education non-parliamentary paper).